Gael Duval, creator of Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva Linux), has been fired from the company. The information leaked on the Mandriva forums, and Duval later confirmed it on his own webpage. He says: "Since the information has leaked, I will post a message in the next few days on this website about why this is the end of the Mandriva story for me, and what's next." Since Mandrake was for many the first distribution they ever tried, I think it is only fair to thank him for creating Mandrake, and to wish him the best of luck in any following endeavours.

Mandriva pioneered many of the technologies that we now take for granted, but many of the kids in this forum appear to be too young to remember.

CUPS, yeap, they were the first to ship it. A journaled file system, first guys on the block that used it. A decent installer with the best partition tool in any currently shipping operating system, yes that's Mandriva's own legacy.

I have never understood why so many people have this animadversion to Mandriva, when it has always kept all of its tools under the GPL, always has had free ISOs, and focused on bringing linux to the average person since day one.

I still have a Mandrake 9.1 server in the closet at home and it keeps on ticking. I plan to upgrade it sometime, but since it's behind a firewall and it does what it needs to do, I haven't gotten around to it.

Mandriva pioneered many of the technologies that we now take for granted, but many of the kids in this forum appear to be too young to remember.

However time has passed and nowdays everybody implements those things, and sometimes they do it better.
So.. if Mandrake was innovative this does not imply Mandriva today is still rocking.
Mandriva today is a different beast than old Mandrake.